It is time for us to hop off the fence and share our favourite premium themes with you. Most of the paid-for options include some amazing themes, and it really does depend on what you want your WordPress blog and/or website to do for you. We especially love working with Genesis from StudioPress and with ElegantThemes.

We’ve avoided promoting one particular premium WordPress theme for some time now, but the time has come to change that. And the winner is… well that’s obvious from the title.

PageLines was a favourite for some time due to its complete flexibility, but with the change to the new subscription model and theme it was time to review this and consider the trusty established choices.

I’ve worked with several premium themes, and still do – they often have their place for their simplicity (Thesis) or when a little quirkiness is wanted (Elegant Themes) but Headway, Thesis and iThemes are rarely used by us now – the former because I just don’t quite “get” it and the latter because it’s too expensive to maintain the developer license, and the middle because I always wanted it to do more.

Brian Clark, the founder of Studiopress, is brilliant at marketing and keeping in touch with his customers’ needs. Take a look at any of his sites and the clean layout, the usability, make it a pleasure to visit and makes us want to do the same for our own and for clients. And the Genesis framework is now a treat to work with.

We do put the themes through their paces, tweaking and bending them to what you want and rarely using the design “out of the box” – adding different colours, fonts, images and moving things about.

For the Blogmistress site we’ve taken the Genesis Mocha theme and changed the background images, the font and some colours, but other than that kept it pretty standard as I feel it will work with what we’re bringing you over the next year or so.

We’ll take a closer look at Elegant Themes next week, and for both those and Genesis we’ll be adding blog posts to help you make the most of your themes too. We’re also happy to help with questions, so fire away…

In the Blogmistress Facebook group we were asked about adding a search option to a WordPress website. And while there are plenty of plugins that offer the various search functions you might want, the simplest thing is to add the search option included in your WordPress already, then test that out – if it does the job well, then you’ve no need to add anything further. Here’s how:

Go to Appearance, Widgets

Select, drag and drop the Search widget into your sidebar or widget area

Test

It is that simple. Do have a good try at finding things to be sure this search option is good enough for your site. If it’s not up to what you need, that’s the time to have a look at the plugin options and see if what you want is there – as ever, when looking for a plugin, look at the details and go for those that are tended to – kept up-to-date and the support posts on the WordPress plugin page monitored and ideally resolved.

Many of us need and want to know where to find and how to add great images to our WordPress blog posts and pages.

Pictures can take a add polish to good blog, making it a great blog; using quality images is important. Simply using images from a Google image search is not a good idea (unless you want to ensure the copyright situation for the images you find and want to use), nor is copy/pasting scrappy-looking clipart from Word, etc.

There are a many ways to include images legally and we make frequent use of the following:

Fotolia for when you want a polished, specifically created image – yes, it costs a from £1.20 for each image, but you choose exactly what you want and know you are legally allowed to use the image. The downside of Fotolia is that many images look staged and obviously “stock” images (not created specifically for you).

Photopin offers images shared freely through Flickr by the photographers. You need to include the credit details for the photographer – this information and link is provided for you to copy/paste to your post or page. You can read how to use Photopin for your WordPress blog here.

And Stock.xchng is still worth a browse for good no-charge, royalty-free photographs.

Just don’t, whatever you do, use images you find in the Google image search – that is not a good idea unless you want to track down and request permission.

There a few plugins that will help you find images too – have a browse if you like (search within Plugins, Add New) but be aware of any links that may need to be included or that your website doesn’t slow down as a result.

This should cover most of your needs, however we’ll take a look at options to create images and how to resize them. And if you use a good image source, please share…

One other thing – be careful not to spend too much time trying to find the perfect image – before you know it, half an hour has passed in enjoying wonderful images!

Adding an image to a blog post or to a website page is a “good thing”. Ideally relevant to the content, a photo or picture can draw the reader in by breaking up the text and making the whole page more readable.

One thing you must not do, however, is use other people’s images without their permission. Google Images is not the place to find your images. Instead go to Photo Pin and find something suitable there, download the best size for your needs (larger if your home page shows a larger image, perhaps in a slider), copy and paste the credit into your page/post, and away you go.

The following video takes you through how to add an image from Photopin to a blog post:

Did you know that with WordPress we can make our own navigation menus?

This is one of my favourite things in WordPress now; before we would have to add plugins to specify which pages and links we wanted to include. Now it is delightfully simple for most of us.

Note: some themes do not allow for this new functionality, sadly. You can work around that with whatever your theme provides and/or make use of the trusty Exclude Pages and Page Links To plugins

WordPress 3.x includes the option to build a custom menu – you can include links to external sites, individual posts, categories, even tags – anything with a link, so pretty much all you could want to include in your navigation.

Here’s how:

Go to Appearance, Menus

Give your menu a name, such as “main” or “primary” and click Create Menu.

Select the Theme Location – sometimes you get to choose a Primary or Secondary Navigation Menu. And Save

Then you want to select your Pages – to start with go to the View All tab, select the pages you want to include in the menu and then click the Add to Menu button.

You’ll see that you can also view the pages in the Most Recent tab too, plus you can Search – if you’ve lots of pages.

You can also “Automatically add new top-level pages” (tick at the top there, beside your Menu Name box).

Save Menu (wise to do this each time you add something, I suggest ).

Scroll down a tad and you can see a box for Custom Links – here you can add links to other websites!

Below this again you have the options to add individual blog Posts (again, view by Most Recent or All, or Search), Categories, and Post Tags.

What more could you possibly want when creating a custom menu?

Well being able to change the title would be good. And you can!

Once you have all the links to pages, websites, posts, etc in place – then you put them in the order you want.

Within your menu area, on the right, you’ll find that you can pick up, drag and drop each menu item, shuffling and arranging them to suit you. In this way you can also next the items too. If this doesn’t make sense, watch the video below to see.

If you want the different wording for any items, you can rename them. Click the wee down arrow beside the item you want to rename – a box will show up in which you can change the Navigation Label – this is one you just do and then Save Menu.

And there you are – a really neat way to create your own navigation menu in WordPress.